The Great Destroyers

by Caroline Tung Richmond

  Granted, my father is no Andy Griffith. The words I love you aren’t in his vocabulary, and I can’t remember the last time he hugged Peter or me or anyone else for that matter, but he has always stuck by us.

  Old Wen doesn’t seem finished waxing poetic. “Have a little mercy on the dead. You should’ve seen your mom with you when you were a baby. She carried you around like a little doll.”

  The tear gas must’ve jumbled his memories because that doesn’t sound like my mother at all. I motion for him to cough up the cash. “I’ll take three twenties and a ten if you got them.”

  He scowls but starts searching for the right bills. “Have you ever heard of the saying ‘A satisfied man is happy even if he is poor’?”

  That’s hilarious coming from him, considering that he grabbed the bet money and nothing else when he escaped from the Jade Lily. “Sounds like someone who has never missed a meal in his life.”

  “It’s a Chinese proverb. You ought to read up. Learn about our history.”

  Now it’s my turn to scowl. Our history? Any interest I might’ve had about that died along with Mom. After her big fight with Dad, she packed a suitcase and grabbed most of the cash out of the coffee tin they kept on the highest shelf in their closet and fled the city. Three months later, she was dead. Killed in a small plane crash outside Los Angeles. She’d used our family’s savings to live the high life, I guess.

  Old Wen is rooting around for a ten-dollar bill when we hear those police sirens again. Both of us swear under our breaths and he starts to close the box, but not before I dart my hand in and out of it like a viper. A couple bucks go tumbling to the ground, but I shove the rest of what I’ve taken into my pocket.

  I take Old Wen by his skinny shoulders. “Where do we go from here?”

  “You go left and I’ll go right. We split up.”

  “I don’t even know where I am!”

  “Head southwest and you’ll make it back to the Tenderloin eventually. Better hurry.”

  Just like that he’s already running off, dragging his left leg a little but making decent time. For a split second, I nearly go after him, but on second thought, I decide that I’m better off alone. I’ve got a hunch that if we ran into the cops, Old Wen would shove the money box into my hands and somehow spin it that this was all my idea.

  With my heart in my throat, I take off sprinting, but there’s a chain-link fence blocking my way. I already have a running start, so I try to clear the fence in a single jump, but I’m no hurdler. I don’t get enough height on the takeoff and the toe of my left shoe catches on the rail. I crash to the ground, hands first, scuffing my knees in the process, but I’m back on my feet again in seconds because those sirens are blaring a little too close for comfort.

  After I’ve zigzagged over half a dozen blocks, I think I’ve shaken off the police, so I crouch underneath a billboard to give my lungs a rest. The sign spells out in big block letters: BE ALERT! STAY ALERT!—a message that went up all over the city following the Cuban Mecha Crisis, urging everyone to be on the lookout for Commie spies. But I don’t spot any rogue Communists out to convert me today, thank God.

  And thank God too for diplomacy. Ever since Khrushchev dragged the rest of us toward another world war, he’s tried to play nice with Kennedy. He’s agreed to install a special hotline that connects the Kremlin to the White House, and he also proposed a truce in Vietnam. The conflict there has been ratcheting up for years, with Khrushchev funneling money to the Communists in the north while Kennedy has sent thousands of military “advisers” to buoy up his allies in the south. But now the two of them have agreed to split Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel and recognize the halves as independent countries. The newspapers have been calling it the Khrushchev Thaw, and there has been chatter that this is the beginning of the end of the Cold War. All that’s left to do is to sign the treaty to formally ratify the Washington-Moscow Accord.

  My breathing soon returns to normal, so I reach into my pocket to count the bills I tucked in there, hoping there’s a little left over to buy myself a Coke because I’m parched. But instead of finding a wad of cash, I feel a huge tear in my pants. The pocket is dangling half off, and it’s miserably empty.

  “God, no,” I whisper.

  My jeans must’ve gotten caught on that fence I tried to clear earlier. I backpedal the way I came, but I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the street signs that I’d passed. I don’t know how long I wander this way and that before I sink onto the curb in front of a soda fountain selling lime rickeys for a dime each, not that I can afford even that.

  My money is gone. Poof. Goodbye. There’s no way we’re going to make rent now. It feels like the Ravager has punched me in the gut, in that soft place where it hurts the most.

  I’m not sure how long I sit there on the sidewalk. Once or twice, a driver honks at me, telling me to get a move on it. Then a couple of beatniks hand me a flyer about a sit-in they’re organizing over on Auto Row, but I stare at it blankly. Eventually a city bus stops across the street from me, and I blink at the advertisement on its side: The Pax Games 1963. Twenty-Five Nations, One Victor. Who Will Take the Prize?

  I wish I could raise my hand and volunteer because that would fix our money problems in a snap. The winner of the Games gets a $500 prize. The amount is purposely kept low since it’s an amateur tournament, not a splashy headliner at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, but it would easily cover a few months of rent. Besides, the real moneymaker is the sponsorships that the winner gets. Cereal boxes. Tennis shoes. Mouthwash. You name it.

  But I won’t be going to the Games. The American Mecha Fighting Association announced the two-person team over a month ago, and I obviously wasn’t on the list. I doubt they even considered me despite my winning record, which was one of the best on the entire West Coast. Heck, west of the Mississippi. But I guess that doesn’t mean much when you’re a girl.

  Before long, the manager of the soda fountain comes out to shoo me away, so I slog home to the Tenderloin district. I stop by our apartment first to wash up and change my clothes, which is tricky because we live in the little two-bedroom above the shop. I have to duck underneath the store window to make sure Peter doesn’t see me before I slink up the stairs. With the curtains drawn tight, I change into my work uniform, a plain white button-down shirt paired with a navy skirt. I’d much prefer trousers, but Dad insists that I dress “feminine” because sometimes he can be frustratingly old-fashioned.

  A bell jingles overhead as I push open the door to the shop. Here at Linden’s we specialize in household repairs. Need the engine replaced on your lawn mower bot? We can help you out. Need a tune-up on your ironing bot? We can handle that too, and we’ll even throw in a discount.

  Household robots started becoming more common following WWII, but you have to be pretty well off to afford them since they run on expensive esterium. That’s why Dad opened our shop on the northern tip of the Tenderloin, only a short walk from the ritzy Nob Hill neighborhood so we can cater to the rich clientele with their vacuuming bots that steam carpets and their dog-walking bots that’ll take their poodles for a stroll on a preprogrammed route. Our monthly rent might be higher here, but it’s been worth the expense—until Rocket Boys stole most of our regulars.

  The store is small but bright, with sunlight spilling through the side windows and onto the limited inventory we have for sale, like a coffee maker bot that Dad bought for cheap at a junkyard and Peter fixed up.

  “Say, would you take five bucks for this junk bucket over here?” I ask Peter, who’s standing behind the front counter and looking worried, probably because I’m terribly late.

  He looks relieved to see me. “Where’ve you been? You should’ve called.”

  “Didn’t have a dime on me or else I would have. You all right?” Guilt gnaws at me for making him anxious. Dad thinks Peter is too much of a worrywart and ought to toughen up, but I’ve got a hunch that my brother has more than the usual run-of-the-mill fretting. Sometimes he gi
ves himself a stomachache when he has a big test at school, and it gets even worse whenever he has to sit through a duck-and-cover drill. When he was younger, he would keep asking me about the possibility of a Soviet invasion and would barely eat for days after the alarms went off.

  “I really am sorry, but my English project ran late, squirt,” I say, using the nickname I’ve been calling him since as long as I can remember. But he’s far from a squirt these days. He’s taller than me now, and in a few years, he’ll overtake our dad, who’s six foot one. No doubt he’ll have the height and build of the ideal American mecha fighter—strong and tall and with muscles to match. It would’ve been prime to have a built-in sparring partner, but Peter prefers fixing up mechas instead of piloting them.

  “English project? You said that you were working on a history report about the Bay of Pigs,” Peter says, his eyes skeptical behind his glasses. He needs a new prescription, but we haven’t been able to buy him a pair, along with a hundred other things we can’t afford.

  “Did I? I meant to say history,” I say quickly. We were supposed to run the shop together since Dad has a meeting at the bank this afternoon, but I fed Peter a cover story on why I’d be late. Trouble is, I need to be better at keeping my own lies consistent.

  Peter sniffs the air. “Why do you smell funny?”

  Oh, that could be due to a number of things, from the muck that I ran through to escape the cops to that awful stench of tear gas that they threw at me. And it all would’ve been worth it if I hadn’t lost the prize money, but I can’t think about that right now.

  “You still working on Mr. Elton’s crêpe-making bot?” I ask, changing the subject and pointing at what looks like a giant disk sliced in half, with little wires and metal parts glinting up at us. This is the very first crêpe-maker bot that we’ve gotten at the shop—at a hundred dollars a pop, only the most loaded customers can afford such a gadget—but I’m sure Peter will figure out how to fix it. I consider myself handy with a screwdriver and a bit drill, but my brother? He’s positively brilliant, a real whiz kid, like he was born with blueprints in his brain.

  I watch him for a minute as he removes the small esterium battery to access the bot’s processing cube. That’s the main difference between bots and mechas. Bots handle menial tasks and are generally self-running, but you have to give them very specific instructions, like Clean the silverware with polish, not water, or else you’ll have ruined cutlery. Their cubes can only handle basic commands.

  Mechas, on the other hand, don’t have processing cubes at all. They’re basically massive mechanical puppets that are controlled by a human pilot and that serve one main purpose. To fight, whether in the pit or on the battlefield.

  Peter sets down his soldering iron. “Come on, why were you late today? You can tell me.”

  And make him worry more? No thank you. In reply, I take off his glasses and blow on the lenses to shine them up. “You had a smudge there.”

  He grabs them with a frown and pushes them back onto his face. “Jo,” he says, annoyed.

  “Peter,” I reply in the same tone, trying to make him laugh.

  But he doesn’t. “I’m not a baby, okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, maybe a little too sharply, but I was only joking around. Ever since he turned thirteen, it’s like his hormones flipped a switch and turned him moodier. Or surly, as Dad says. That isn’t all that has changed either. He’s looking a little more like Mom too. I see it in his cheekbones now that he has lost most of the baby fat on his face. Peter has always had shades of our mother in his features, like his brown eyes and dark hair that’s as thick as a painter’s brush. Me, on the other hand? I’m the reverse. I have our mother’s slight build, but the rest of me is all Dad. Same noses. Same light brown hair. Same right hook in the fighting pit.

  “Why won’t you tell me what you were up to?” Peter says.

  I pretend not to hear him. I want to put the Jade Lily behind me. Move on and figure out how to make rent some other way so Peter can worry more about fixing crêpe makers than where we’ll crash every night. I’m about to tell him to go take a break already when there’s a pounding on the shop door.

  “We’re open,” I call out. I walk toward the entrance, but before I get there, the door swings on its hinges so hard that it shakes.

  Standing at the threshold, I see a white man in a black suit, his eyes covered with sunglasses and his hair buzzed close to the scalp. My eyes trail down the lines of his suit jacket toward his waistline, which flares out a little right over the hip. It’s a telltale sign that he’s packing heat. A gun.

  I freeze on the spot. He must be one of Hoover’s FBI agents. That’s their uniform. A few years back, one of our neighbors got busted for joining the Communist party and right before his arrest I’d seen men like this one hanging around our block. I’d thought that the police would’ve been the ones following my trail from the Jade Lily. Not this.

  “Can we help you with something?” Peter says from behind me.

  I block my brother from getting any closer and stare at the goon in front of us.

  The man takes off his sunglasses and stares straight at me. “I’m looking for Josephine Linden.”

  Peter’s eyes go round. “What do you need my sister for?” he asks, but I shush him.

  “What’s this all about, sir?” I ask, fighting to steady my voice. My eyes dart to the door. Should I make a break for it? I bet I could outrun him, but he already knows my name and where I live. Did Old Wen give me up? I swear I could strangle his wrinkled neck.

  The man gives me a funny look. “I’m here to do a sweep of the premises on behalf of the senator’s office.”

  “The senator?” Peter and I say at the same time.

  My relief is short-lived though. The man proceeds to walk past us to survey our storage room and the adjacent workshop, switching the lights on and off as he goes.

  “Is this some new state inspection?” I ask, wondering if Dad forgot to fill out our annual paperwork. Just like that, my heart is thundering again and I’m wondering what sort of fines we’ll need to pay off.

  “Nope, and I’m all done here,” he replies.

  “Done with what?” I ask. Does this mean that he isn’t arresting me?

  “Someone will be in shortly to explain,” he says, which isn’t any help at all. Then, with a curt nod, he exits the store as quickly as he entered it, striding outside to a car parked out front. It’s a black sedan, a Cadillac, and I see an older white woman step out of the back seat and onto the curb. The first thing I notice is that she’s very tall. I have to tip my chin up to get a decent glimpse of her face, which has a stern look to it, like a librarian getting ready to say, Keep it down! because you’ve turned a page too loudly. She’s dressed like a librarian too, wearing a black dress with a white collar that has been ironed stiff.

  Peter elbows my side. “That’s Senator Appleby!” he whispers so loudly that the barber next door probably overhears him.

  “How would you know?” I whisper back.

  “You really ought to read the paper more.”

  I’m tempted to tell him that I’ve been a little busy trying to keep a roof over our heads, but Peter doesn’t know how dire our situation has gotten. Dad and I have an unspoken agreement to shield him from that.

  The woman approaches us, and I can only stare. There’s a US senator coming toward me, and I have to question all over again if I’m in very big trouble, but then she juts out a hand for me to shake and her whole face changes with a smile. “You must be Josephine, although I’ve heard you prefer Jo.”

  Peter clears his throat loudly until I realize that I’m being a total ding-a-ling because I’ve yet to shake her hand, so I remedy that fast. Before I can cough out how does she know my name, she turns to Peter to shake his hand too.

  “And you must be Peter,” she says to him.

  My brother, who has been slouching ever since a recent growth spurt catapulted him to become the tallest kid in h
is class, stands up straight as a stick. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well then, why don’t we all step inside and have a little chat? I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. She simply walks into the shop like she’s a regular customer, leading the way and expecting us to follow, which we do.

  “Let me get you something to sit on,” I say, spinning around in a circle as if a set of chairs will magically appear. The best I can do is the stepstool we have behind the counter, but Senator Appleby shakes her head when I pick it up.

  “I’m fine standing. Despite my age, I’m far from fragile,” she says, waving off my offer.

  She’s right about that. I’d never use fragile to describe her. It isn’t only her height or her broad shoulders. It’s the way she carries herself, like she isn’t someone you want to tangle with, even if she’s a few decades older than you.

  “Can we help you with something, Senator?” I ask. Because I’m pretty sure she hasn’t stopped by to buy a used vacuum cleaner.

  “Indeed you can. I wanted to talk to you about the reel you mailed to the Association a few months back,” she replies.

  A second passes before I register what she’s talking about. Every year, amateur fighters have the opportunity to mail in a demo reel of their season’s highlights to the American Mecha Fighting Association, the national governing body of the sport. After going through thousands of reels and scoring them, the Association then publishes a list of the top amateurs in every region. But here’s the catch. They hardly ever include female fighters on their lists. The last time that happened was back in 1943, when a decent chunk of the male population was overseas fighting in WWII. Despite those odds, I’ve sent in my reel season after season out of pure stubbornness, except I didn’t do it this year. Money had gotten so tight that I didn’t want to waste it on an envelope and postage that would probably get tossed away unopened.

  “I think there must’ve been a mistake—” I start to tell her, but Peter digs an elbow into my ribs. When I glance at him, he gets a bashful look on his face and gives a little shrug. My mouth drops open. Did he put together my reel and mail it in? That precious little sneak.